It's an impulse well known to all teenagers: When you have the house to yourself for a stretch of time, the first thing to do is invite all your friends over.

In 1993, composer Charles Amirkhanian found himself in possession of just such a piece of tantalizingly available real estate. After stepping down as music director of KPFA in Berkeley, he'd taken a new job as executive director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, based on a 700-acre ranch in Woodside -- a perfect gathering place for composers of all stripes to hang out, swap yarns and get to know one another's music.

And so he inaugurated the Other Minds Festival, an annual event that is something between a house party and think tank for the contemporary music set. The festival celebrates its 10th season this week with three jam-packed days of concerts, film screenings and panel discussions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The plan is beguilingly simple. Each year, a diverse crowd of composers assembles in Woodside for several days of private powwows, at the end of which they come up to San Francisco for public performances.

But within that straightforward framework, the possibilities for cross- fertilization are as various as the composers themselves. Over the past decade, minimalists and free-jazz improvisers, academics and Hollywood composers, rockers and electronic composers and folk singers have been eased into dialogue with one another.

"As a composer myself, I've been invited to festivals where I fly in, do my piece and fly out," says Amirkhanian, 59.

"I don't think that's right. If you're going to bring a composer from across the world, they ought to take away something that will invigorate their career on one level or another. What they get here is a deep personal connection, honest feedback when they play their works on the ranch and shop talk of the kind that composers never do."

Often the networking has a concrete payoff. One year, a visit by percussionist Evelyn Glennie inspired four of the composers to write pieces for her.

Julia Wolfe, a young New York composer who was one of the co-founders of the influential Bang on a Can Festival, got her first recording on Philip Glass' short-lived Point Music record label after spending a week at Djerassi with him. "She lived around the corner from him and would see him on the street but never had the nerve to approach him," says Amirkhanian.

And although the socializing and shop talk takes place behind the scenes, Amirkhanian insists that the spirit fostered during those sessions spills over into the public events as well.

"Most panel discussions before concerts are pretty awful, but ours have a kind of interactivity and kidding and teasing that brings things down to earth so the audience can understand what motivates a piece."

This year's lineup is as far-ranging as ever. Thursday's opening-night concert alone features new works by Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian (featuring viola virtuoso Kim Kashkashian), a quarter-tone flute concerto by Polish composer Hanna Kulenty and a new work by Jon Raskin for the Rova Saxophone Quartet and a sextet of traditional Asian instruments.

Like any curator, Amirkhanian canvases the world for new creative voices -- although the success of the festival means he now gets inundated with submissions as well.

He came across Mansurian during a 1991 trip to Armenia, and Kulenty's music stood out during a recent new-music festival in Holland. And he discovered Hussong much closer to home -- in the Tower Classical Annex at Columbus and Bay.

"I was in there one day and I heard this recording of some guy playing John Cage on the accordion. I bought the CD immediately and spent the next few years trying to track him down. Look, you find 'em where you find 'em."

Other Minds developed out of a similar project, Composer to Composer, that Amirkhanian ran briefly in Telluride, Colo., which, in turn, was inspired by a political program that took place under the auspices of the Telluride Festival.

"There were four days of private sessions with people like Tom Hayden, Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Shirley Williams -- all these people who would normally be antagonistic to one another. But the chemistry was such that all of that dissolved and they were able to talk about the big issues.

"And I thought we could do that with music as well, talk about questions like censorship and the future of tonality, that composers never get to hang around and discuss."

In 10 years, Other Minds has expanded its scope of activities while operating on a paper-thin annual budget of $500,000. There have been CDs -- most recently a fascinating collection of music by the poet Ezra Pound -- and film screenings, including this weekend's showing of Peter Rosen's documentary on composer Aram Khachaturian.

The most recent project is a Web site, www.radiom.org, which is gradually making available some of the 4,000 tapes from the KPFA archive (including a 1973 interview with a young and ambitious John Adams).

The festival had some notable successes, including the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Henry Brant's "Ice Field," a co-commission by the festival and the San Francisco Symphony.

But the heart of the festival is still the annual composer get-together, spurred by the rustic beauty of the Woodside ranch.

"For three days, it's like a pinball machine. People are so happy to be there that they're receptive to whatever's going on. Whoever's standing at the fence staring at the moon gets to talk to the other person who's staring at the moon."